Glossary
Apprentice Level Learner: Performances demonstrate flexible use of disciplinary concepts or ideas in a range of contexts when supported to various degrees. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Assessment: Generally, an attempt to understand what is being demonstrated or what is happening. Often an ongoing process of feedback about the quality of students' products and processes, used as a part of instruction to promote learning. Contrast this definition with "evaluation."
Behaviorism: The dominant sub-field of psychology until the 1950's. Behaviorists denied that there was anything called "the mind." Because only "behavior" was important in human psychology, psychologists focused exclusively on people's actions. They rewarded behavior to encourage it and punished behavior to discourage it. "Behavioral objectives" are based on this philosophy.
Collaborative Assessment Conference: A protocol or structure for a conversation among a group that helps to focus a sustained conversation (often but not always about student work) without getting sidetracked into other issues. The Collaborative Assessment Conference asks participants to withhold judgment in order to stay present and open to what actually exists in the work itself.
Conceptual understanding: Having a clear and generative conception or idea about something; being able to think about it, imagine it, plan it, study it, gather evidence about it, and so forth.
Constructivism: The educational view that knowledge and understanding are best retained when they are learned by active engagement with ideas rather than through rote memorization. The theory views all knowledge and understanding as the result of an individual's internal processes of construction and sense making rather than as something that can be imposed from the outside.
Criteria: The qualities contained in a piece of excellent student work: What counts on a rubric.
Description: The process of emphasizing identifying and naming what we see over making judgments about what we see.
Design Decisions: Choices about how to create something (for example, portfolios) that involve considerations of purpose, aesthetic relationships, values, feasibility, materials, audience, and the like.
Dimensions of Understanding: A framework defined during the Teaching for Understanding research project that identifies four qualities that comprise disciplinary understanding: Knowledge, Methods, Purposes, and Forms (See definitions elsewhere in this document). Each dimension also has levels of understanding: Naīve, Novice, Apprentice, and Master (See definitions elsewhere in this document). Also see Wiske, 1998, chapters 6 and 7, for a complete description of these terms.
Disciplines: Human inventions that produce answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. Disciplines include such subjects as classical music, biology, architecture, mathematics, history, and literature that are our "mental furniture" or what we "think in." The disciplines allow people to make sense of the world through their syntax (the rules by which they work) and their semantics (the content upon which they focus). Gardner sees mastering the disciplines as the single most important and least-replaceable purpose of schooling.
Entity vs. Incremental Learning: These are terms coined by Carol Dweck and her colleagues at the University of Illinois. Entity learners describes those learners who harbor the philosophy that learning something new is taking in an entire entity all at once. It leads to "early quitters," because those who hold this conception of learning feel that effort doesn't help learning-because "you get it or you don't." Incremental learners describes learners who believe that learning requires persistence, that understanding is won through continued effort, and that mastery is acquired in steps.
Entry Points: The several ways Howard Gardner has defined for approaching disciplinary content so that many children (all with unique minds) are invited to engage seriously with it. Entry points are called by various names, including narrative (stories), quantitative (or numerical), logical (sometimes combined with quantitative), aesthetic (formal properties having to do with beauty and ugliness, such as line, form, harmony, color), existential (or foundational or philosophical-the "essential" unanswerable questions, for example, about life, death, people, and the universe), hands-on (or experiential), interpersonal (or collaborative, social). Gardner has called them "doors into the same room."
Evaluation: A final judgment of the quality or rank of a piece of student work. Also an effort to judge or rank student work in relation to some criteria. Contrast with "assessment."
Examples and Exemplars: Exemplars show what great work looks like. Examples are of varying quality and are used because analyzing weaknesses can be instructive.
Exhibitions: A final performance and/or demonstration at the culmination of a long-term project, often reviewed and evaluated by a panel.
Exit Points: Performances of understanding that serve as the culminating performances for a unit of study based on a generative topic. Exit points can be proto-typical (those used as the canon by professionals within the field) or atypical (forms that express disciplinary content in forms not traditionally used by professionals within the field). Generally, reflection of some sort needs to be coupled with atypical performances in order to demonstrate disciplinary understanding. A unit without proto-disciplinary forms may not represent disciplinary understanding sufficiently.
Forms: The dimension of understanding that considers the mastery of genres and symbol systems, and the ways in which the presentations of genres and symbol systems varies in consideration of audience and context. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Generative Topic: Those topics, issues, themes, concepts, ideas and so on that provide enough depth, significance, connections and variety of perspective to support students' development of powerful understandings. Typically they are central to one or more domains or disciplines, interesting and accessible to students and teachers, and rich in connections within and beyond the discipline. This is one of the four main elements of the Teaching for Understanding framework.
Gradations of Quality: Levels of performance described on a rubric, from very strong to very weak.
High-Level Thinking: Sophisticated forms of thinking that include but are not limited to generalizing, reasoning, predicting, classifying, comparing and contrasting, seeking evidence for and against a claim, and so forth.
High-Leverage Practices: Practices that provide a great deal of payoff or return on effort. Three such practices are perspective taking, introducing ambiguity, and looking closely.
High-Stakes Assessments: Tests that result in consequential decisions about student promotion or the distribution of resources relative to scores.
Idea-Action Gap: The gulf between a thought or idea and doing something with it in practice.
Inquiry: A systematic process of investigation of a matter of interest.
Instructional Rubric: An assessment tool designed to support learning by describing high quality work and common problems encountered in assignments in language that students can understand and apply.
Intelligence (Gardner's definition): The biological potential to process information in certain ways, in order to solve problems or fashion products that are valued in a culture or community. They can be thought of as devices humans have-sometimes compared to computers-that allow people to solve problems valued by our societies.
Interdisciplinary Understanding: The ability to use knowledge and modes of thinking from two or more disciplines to create products, solve problems and offer explanations that cannot be adequately tackled by single disciplinary perspectives. In Interdisciplinary Understanding disciplinary views are not merely juxtaposed, rather they are intertwined to produce rich syntheses.
Interpretation: Explanation of a set of perceptions.
Knowledge Art: A term coined by David Perkins for the art and craft of handling knowledge well, including "reading" and "writing" in all media, reasoning, inquiry, learning, teaching, and so on. The knowledge arts include, but are much broader than, thinking and learning skills. Each discipline has its characteristic knowledge art, which is the way inquiry, argument, and expression of ideas work within that discipline.
Knowledge: The dimension of understanding that considers intuitive beliefs and the coherence and richness of knowledge webs (facts, concepts, and their relationships). (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Learning for Understanding: Processes that students and other learners use to nurture the development of understanding rather than just memorizing rote "templates" presented in classes.
Looking Closely: The practice of returning over and over again to a concept to probe what is there so that we see more of its qualities and characteristics. Looking closely supports mindfulness (see below).
Master Level Learner: Performances integrate disciplinary concepts and ideas flexibly, critically, and creatively, both with and without support. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Mental Representations: Simply put, an "idea." The argument that there is something called "a human mind" and that it "represents" the world mentally in symbolic languages. A mental representations view contradicts the behaviorist point of view.
Metacognition: Thinking about thinking. Regulating your thinking and learning by planning ahead, monitoring and making adjustments as you go, taking stock afterward and planning improvements.
Methods: The dimension of understanding that considers healthy skepticism, and the ways in which disciplinary knowledge is built and judged (i.e., the processes of knowledge creation and validation). (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Misconceptions: A general term for intuitive but incorrect theories about the world and how it works. These naīve theories block development of more sophisticated disciplinary understanding. Howard Gardner uses this term to mean a theory learned early in life that blocks understanding in the sciences, specifically.
Multiple Intelligences Theory: Gardner's "Theory of Multiple Intelligences" suggests that individuals perceive the world in at least eight or nine different and equally important ways and that educational programs should foster the development of all these forms of thinking and learning. In 2002, the list that fulfills the eight criteria (please see the eight criteria in Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), Chapter 4) Gardner uses to decide what counts as an intelligence includes linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Existential remains an intelligence candidate
awaiting more convincing neural evidence.
Naīve Level Learner: Performances lack reflection and show few or no signs of personal engagement with or ownership of knowledge or what knowledge could be used for. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Novice Level Learner: Performances are "rote and ritual," often based on memorization alone, and appear motivated by quality judgments from external authorities rather than by internal curiosity, with quality assessed by comparison to rational criteria used among a community of experts. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Ongoing Assessment: Continual checks by students, teachers, or other experts on understanding that is developed and demonstrated by performances. Ongoing assessment provides information about how to proceed with subsequent teaching and learning. The process requires two conditions: 1) That performances of understanding have clear, public assessment criteria that are closely related to the understanding goals and 2) that students have the opportunity to receive feedback on their performances of understanding both during and after performances (thus enabling them to use the feedback to improve their work). One of the four main elements of the Teaching for Understanding framework.
Overarching Goals: Also called "throughlines." These are understanding goals that relate to all the units of a course or year of study.
Peer-Assessment: Checks on learning that allow and encourage classmates to offer feedback on each other's work and understanding.
Performance Assessments: Tasks given within set conditions designed to reveal what students can actually do and how flexibly they can use their knowledge.
Performances of Understanding or Understanding Performances: Thoughts and actions that require students to think and use what they know flexibly in new ways or situations to expand it further. In such activities students reshape, extrapolate from, apply, and build on what they already know. Performances of understanding tend to occur in the context of learning rather than separate from it, and they're authentic, meaning that students work on problems that have meaning to the student and to professionals in the field and use real materials to investigate those problems.
Portfolio Assessment: The careful examination of portfolios of student work to help students, teachers, parents, and possibly other audiences understand students' work and achievements.
Portfolios: Collections of work selected to serve various purposes, including assessment of developing understanding (processfolios), demonstrations of best products, or demonstration of the range of effort expended. Decisions about what to include in portfolios, who makes the choices, how the choices are made, and what is done with the portfolio of work all determine what the portfolio is and the value it has to different audiences.
Projects: Sustained explorations of relatively complex topics, questions, problems, processes, or ideas that are often carried out in groups and that often result in products that are shared with others (exhibitions).
Protocol: Specified steps and questions that foster focused conversations about a topic or problem.
Purposes: The dimension of understanding that considers the awareness of the reasons that various concepts of disciplinary knowledge exist, how that knowledge is used by members of a field, and the degree of ownership and autonomy students demonstrate in relation to disciplinary knowledge. (see also "Dimensions of Understanding in this Glossary")
Rubric: Scoring guides for the assessment and evaluation of student work that have two characteristics: 1) a list of criteria, and 2) descriptions of varying levels of quality for each criterion.
Scoring Rubric: An assessment tool designed to evaluate an understanding performance that has been scaffolded with an Instructional Rubric.
Self-Assessment: Checks on learning that allow and encourage students to evaluate their own work and progress and revise accordingly.
Student Work: Those things students produce in school over various lengths of time and with varying amounts of teacher direction and student-investment.
Teaching for Understanding Framework (TfU): a pedagogical framework with four interacting elements (Generative Topics, Understanding Goals, Performances of Understanding, and Ongoing Assessment) that help teachers think about, plan, and carry out instruction focused on helping students develop disciplinary understanding.
Thinking Dispositions: Broadly defined, tendencies toward particular patterns of intellectual behavior that include thinking skills but also include motivations, emotions, values, and other elements often left out of skill-centered accounts of thinking, as well as alertness to occasions that invite or call for thinking. Thinking dispositions can be positive, negative, or neutral. However, the term is typically used to refer to positive thinking dispositions- patterns of intellectual behavior that tend to yield rational action, rational belief, insight, innovation, and understanding. Others have used the term "habits of mind" to describe similar patterns of behavior.
Throughlines: A type of understanding goal, usually stated in the form of a question but sometimes represented as diagrams or quotations, that identify the concepts, processes, and skills about which teachers want students to develop understanding and motivate and focus inquiry during a semester- or year-long course. Throughlines span generative topics: they can be addressed in the context of virtually every generative topic taught during a course. Typically, unit-long understanding goals are more specific versions of the throughlines. Also called "overarching understanding goals."
Understanding: The ability to use ideas flexibly in novel contexts (e.g., classrooms, neighborhoods, or on the job). Acquiring understanding is not straightforward. It is difficult to achieve, because the old ideas people have are entrenched and difficult to topple and revitalize with new, more sophisticated ideas.
Understanding Goals: Goals that identify the concepts, processes, and skills about which teachers want students to develop understanding. They are worded in two ways: as statements (that often begin, "Students will understand?" or "Students will appreciate?" or "Students will begin to develop understanding of?") and as open-ended questions. For example, "Students will develop understanding of how scientists validate their results" (statement form) or "How do scientists judge the accuracy of their findings?" (question form). There are two "sizes" of understanding goals: "unit-long" understanding goals, which are fairly specific and pertain to a particular period or unit of instruction, and "overarching" understanding goals (or "throughlines"), which pertain to an entire course or year of instruction.
Understanding in Action (Understanding as Performance): Being able to think and act flexibly with what you know about something. Responding to "teachable moments" is an example of "understanding in action" on the part of a teacher.
Understanding Performances (or Performances of Understanding): Thoughts and actions that use knowledge flexibly and expand it further. Understanding performances require students to use knowledge in new ways or situations. In such activities students reshape, extrapolate from, apply, and build on what they already know.
